Hostage by Clare Mackintosh
FIFTY
CHRISTMAS EVE | MINA
“I’m nervous.” I look up at Rowan. “Isn’t that silly?” We’re standing in baggage collection at Gatwick, a place I’ve stood a hundred times before—watching the same cases go around and around. In the center of the carousel is a Christmas tree decorated with cardboard cutout suitcases.
“Because of the press?”
“Yes,” I say, although I hadn’t thought about the press. It’s the prospect of seeing Adam that’s filling me with anxiety. We’ve spoken every day for the last six days, the poor connection doing nothing to help the awkwardness between us. I look at his face on my screen and it’s the same old Adam, yet so much has happened since I last saw him.
He’s told me everything. The gambling, the loan sharks, the dizzying interest rates. The lies he told at work; the fact that he might lose his job. When he told me how the man had threatened Katya, and I remembered how Sophia’s night terrors had started that very week, I couldn’t take anymore. I ended the call and turned off my phone and sat in the bar of my hotel, emotions heightened by one coffee after another.
They put the crew in the same hotel as the passengers, an entire ground-floor corridor cordoned off for interview rooms. We moved like invalids through the restaurants and lounges, shepherded between doctors, police, and journalists, and—whenever we needed it—counselors.
“The relationships between you and the other crew and passengers will be complex,” said the first psychologist. She was talking to us all in a conference room at Sydney airport, arming us with tools to survive the next few days—just in case we had thought our ordeal over. “You might hate one another, because the very sight reminds you of what’s happened,” she said. “Or you might feel closer to one another than you do to your own family. You’ve been through hell over the last twenty hours. Whatever you’re feeling right now is normal, I promise.”
I feel anything but normal. Guilt consumes me, from the second I wake to when my eyes finally close, exhausted from the interviews, the anxiety, the compulsion to go over and over what happened. The hotel was full of traumatized passengers, meeting in corners of the lounge to say, I keep remembering when… Every day, a cluster of tourists would arrive to check in and we’d stare at them, wondering what it felt like to be arriving in Sydney for a holiday, to emerge from a flight with nothing more than jet lag.
Adam gave me space. I ate dinner with Rowan and Derek, wishing Cesca were there. The blade of the ax missed her brain by millimeters. Her condition was still critical, the doctors said, and it remained to be seen what long-term damage had been caused, but she was going to live. They’d keep her in ICU in St. Vincent’s until it was safe to bring her back to the UK. I wanted to visit, wanted to get out of my head the image of the last time I’d seen her, blood matting her hair, but they wouldn’t allow visitors until she was more stable.
We fell into a routine, like holidaymakers on a cruise, meeting for meals then disappearing to our rooms, never leaving the confines of the hotel. I detected—rightly or wrongly—an animosity toward me from the rest of the crew, and it felt no less than I deserved, so I was glad of those passengers who offered gentle support. As long as I live, I will never come to terms with what I did.
“Anyone would have done the same,” Rowan said. We were having a drink after dinner, Derek having retired for the night. I needed to sleep, but I was frightened to be alone, frightened of what I’d see in my dreams.
“But they didn’t. I did.” I was haunted by the look in Carmel’s eyes, by the senseless deaths of Mike, Ben, and Louis. So many lost lives.
“So many saved lives.” Rowan was a teacher—math, for my sins!—and I could see he was a good one. He had the sort of eyes that crinkle with a smile and a way of explaining things that made them suddenly clear. Single. Not that it mattered to me, of course. “Never met the right woman,” he said and grinned, then his face grew serious, and my breath caught in my chest. We both looked away at the same time, both wondered aloud if we shouldn’t call it a night. Headed off down separate corridors to our separate rooms, and I lay awake, too tired to sleep, wondering if things would ever feel the same again.
I called Adam the next day, the urge to see him greater than the anger I felt at the danger he’d put our daughter in. I thought about the years I’d lied to him—to everyone—about why I’d abandoned my dreams to be a pilot. What made one lie worse than another?
“I miss you,” I said.
“We miss you too.”
I was desperate to get home. Adam promised me Sophia was fine, and I believed him, but the thread that tied me to my daughter was tugging at my heart. One more day of interviews, they kept saying. Just one more day, then you can go home.
World Airlines suspended the direct route as a mark of respect, and we changed planes at Shanghai. Their stock fell by 42 percent, and I wondered how long it would take to repair the damage Missouri and her team had done. I guess that means they won, in some sense.
Dindar booked out the whole of business class for our flights home, leaving empty those seats surplus to requirements, the way they do for security when the Queen flies. The full crew and those passengers whose travel plans changed after our hijack ordeal. The pregnant woman opted to fly home to her husband, who—given the extenuating circumstances—was granted leave for Christmas. Doug came home, leaving Ginny to lick her wounds at the five-star resort he’d booked for their “honeymoon.”
Rowan had been on his way to Sydney for a conference he never got to attend. “Not much point staying now,” he said when the return tickets were offered. None of us could imagine hanging around to sightsee.
Jason Poke came back to the UK too, along with a handful of other passengers, including a family with economy tickets who thought it might be their only opportunity to fly business class. I wasn’t the only one to feel a sudden, desperate need to be home for Christmas.
Finley and his mum had adjacent seats. I handed him a small gift just before takeoff, and as he tore off the paper, his eyes lit up.
“Airpods! Awesome!”
“I thought you’d like them,” I said, grinning, watching him slip the wireless buds into his ears.
“Thank you. You’re very kind,” his mother said. She didn’t take her eyes off him the whole flight. When he grew too tired to stay awake, she lay on her side, the partition lowered between their seats, and watched him sleep.
I was worried about Derek. I sat in the lounge at Sydney airport, remembering the despair in his voice when we were huddled on the floor in economy. He’d changed his mind, sure, but was that simply the pressure of the situation? The lack of control? The day of the press conference, he had shared a link on Twitter to a blog post. It was a series of goodbyes from the airplane, poignant and blackly humorous, and it moved me to tears. Had he changed his mind again? Was this his suicide note?
Then, minutes before the gate was due to be announced, he barreled into the lounge with a carry-on suitcase and a newspaper. He’d been offered a column in the Times. He made light of it, but his shoulders were straighter, his expression lighter. I was glad that something good had come of it, for him.
They gave us five-star treatment on our flights home, complete with a counselor and a doctor who gave me a sleeping pill when I was too frightened to shut my eyes. When I woke, sweating and crying, Rowan talked me down off the ledge I’d climbed onto.
I wasn’t the only one to scream in my sleep or to shake uncontrollably when the pilot announced we were facing a little turbulence—please fasten your seat belts. I wasn’t the only one to look at my fellow passengers, making sure I recognized each one, that none of Missouri’s team had somehow slipped through the net.
My suitcase rounds the corner, and I step forward, but Rowan gets there first. “Let me.”
As we turn the corner into Arrivals, the noise is deafening. Camera flashes light up the hall with a dizzying intensity, and I’m glad of the sunglasses Rowan had suggested we both wear. It had felt foolish—like wannabe celebrities—but the onslaught is terrifying, and my instinct is to hide. Rowan steers me toward the exit, his hand firm and safe on the small of my back. There are shouts of over here!
I see Alice Davanti talking on her mobile. She skirts around the mass of reporters and heads directly for the exit. She’ll be going straight to the office, I expect, getting the scoop on the hijack of the decade. As the first hijacked passengers arrive back in Britain…
“Mina, will you be facing criminal charges?”
The room swims, a sea of faces moving in and out of focus. I feel myself fall. I’m back on the plane, I’m opening the flight-deck door, I’m seeing Mike’s face…
“Medic!”
A convenient collapse, one of the more unpleasant newspapers will call it. Overwhelmed by her heroic landing, another will say. I could have given them different headlines. TERRIFIED. HAUNTED. GUILTY.
Rowan helps me to my feet, and I brush off the enthusiastic first aider who has rushed to my side. Because I’ve seen something, among the chauffeurs’ boards and the journalists’ tape recorders, and it’s the only medicine I need.
The sign is painted on cardboard, Sophia’s careful letters filled in with red paint and glitter.
WELCOME HOME MUMMY.
Taped around the edges of the sign, overlapping like petals, are dozens of smaller pieces of paper. The notes I’ve put on Sophia’s pillow every time I’ve left her. She’s kept every single one.
I let go of my case, and I run. I run as fast as I can toward the sign, toward my daughter, toward home.
“Mummy!”
I pick her up and squeeze her so tight, crying into her hair, smelling her shampoo, her skin, the very essence of her. She’s crying, and I’m crying, and then I feel an arm around me and I know the weight so well; I know the feel of it so well.
“What took you so long?” Adam says softly.
I squeeze my eyes shut and force out the horrors of Flight 79 and instead focus on the familiar arms of my husband and on the soft body squashed between us. This is my family. This is my life.
“Sorry I’m late.”